Leapfrogging (strategy)
Military strategy / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the World War II strategy. For the biological migration movement of island hopping, see Oceanic dispersal. For other uses of "Island hopping", see Island hopping (disambiguation).
Leapfrogging, also known as island hopping, was an amphibious military strategy employed by the Allies in the Pacific War against the Empire of Japan during World War II. The key idea was to bypass heavily fortified enemy islands instead of trying to capture every island in sequence en route to a final target. The reasoning was that those islands could simply be cut off from their supply chains (leading to their eventual capitulation) rather than needing to be overwhelmed by superior force, thus speeding up progress and reducing losses of troops and materiel.